The View from Infinity Beach is a SciFi Young Adult novel that was self-published by author R.P.L. Johnson in 2021. It was also a part of my group of books for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC2 - my reviews of these books can be found here) and was a favorite of one of my co-Judges. So after it made the Quarterfinals, I was excited to give it a try.
Unfortunately, The View from Infinity Beach didn't quite live up to my expectations. It's a fine science fiction YA novel of the kind that I think was pretty common back in the 90s - featuring a bunch of teens on a space station find themselves leading a rebellion against an occupying military greedy force from Earth. However, while the physics of the setting (a space station rotating to create gravity) are used pretty well, the characters other than the lead character are paper thin, and there just isn't anything special here....it's just very much a generic YA SciFi book full of teens leading a fight against adults in space, and there's a lot better out there.
Quick Plot Summary: Kade never felt truly comfortable on Earth, but he didn't want to head up to the Space Station Excalibur, which is known for its mining of asteroids for minerals which it then sends back to Earth. But on Excalibur, Kade discovers not just a bunch of teens his age, but something he never expected: the Kera, an asteroid whose interior has been shaped into a new world, filled with grass, beaches, and the potential for life that humans no longer have back on Earth, and Kade is enthralled by the possibility. But when military forces from Earth seize both the Kera and Excalibur for their own greedy purposes, Kade and his friends will be forced to try to fight back...but what can a bunch of teens do against armed adults?
Thoughts: The View from Infinity Beach's best attributes are its lead character Kade and its setting, which uses the idea that the rotating station (for gravity) results in thrown objects and things in flight to curve in some interesting ways. There's also some hacking and virtual reality, which is done adequately enough.
But everything else just feels very generic - teens in science fiction facing off against adults with superior force, using smarts and planning to outwit them and lead a revolution is a pretty classic trope, and this book doesn't really do too much interesting with it. The biggest problem there is that its characters have no depth whatsoever. There's Kade, the protagonist, and John a secondary character POV who's just an annoying sociopath, and then the other two teens basically get no characterization at all, meaning when they take some actions later in the book, they just come out of nowhere and I had little reason to care for them at all. Add in the fact that the only female characters in this book are those without characterization and there are no queer characters at all, and well it just feels like a throwback to a 90s that we really didn't need.
This isn't a bad book. But it's not one I can really recommend over many many other books out there.
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